Acquiring the rights

A team member in our media group took the initiative over the summer and emailed a publishing company as well as attaching a licensing form to them asking for the rights of the music. The band is known by many but hasn’t gotten to the stage of actually having a VEVO account on YouTube. The publishing company is called Bank Robber Music and has Mark Simek who is in charge of the master rights.

Beforehand I personally contacted the Interscope Publishing Company which is for years and years but they did not reply unfortunately. The reason to why I wanted to use their music for our music video is because they are under the genre of indie pop and our group have picked the genre for which we would like to use to create our music video. The email was sent approximately on the 7th September so there may be a chance that they could still reply but since we already have rights to ‘All The Places’, we are just moving ahead with that song since we all feel quite passionate about the meaning of the lyrics and how we can portray those lyrics through media.

MADEINHEIGHTS is a band that is made up of two people: Sabzi and Kelsey Bulkin.

The pair of them work well together due to Sabzi being a DJ and producer well Kelsey is solely a singer. We were very lucky though due to the publishing company getting back to us within 2 days and it was our second attempt at getting the rights to the song, the first attempt wasn’t as successful. However, we were anticipating that getting the rights may take up to even a month but yet again luck was on our side.

Date Action taken10th August Attached form was sent to the publishing

company ‘Bank Robber Music’.11th August Reply had been received that the request had

been approved.12th August Group member emailed Mark Simek asking

about the master rights making sure that we are entitled to that as well as the publishing rights itself.

Difference between master rights and publishing

(Music) Publishing rights – This only relates to the musical composition words and music. It also relates to the money that is made from government mandated royalties that must be paid to you when other people or even organisations use the music that you wrote. It can also refer to a radio station for example making a copy of your song to help them make money.

Master rights – This includes the sound recordings. A single musical composition can be embodied in hundreds of different sound recordings. It’s also recordings that you can make money off selling it directly to the audience by distributing it to iTunes for example or even a CD. Another option is that is that you can get signed to a record label which will do that for you and help you sell your music to the public.

Source: http://help.songtrust.com/customer/portal/articles/229946-what-is-the-difference-between-master-recordings-and-music-publishing-

The reason why we need both is because of the reasons above and it’s to make sure that once we put our work on to YouTube, our work won’t be taken down.